Expecting the loss of as many as 120,000 jobs in the region because of the financial crisis emanating from Wall Street, New York State officials are preparing to ask for more than $60 million in federal aid to preserve threatened jobs and retrain displaced workers. þþLabor department commissioners from several states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, were to discuss the potential fallout with federal officials on Wednesday, said M. Patricia Smith, New York’s labor commissioner. þþShe said that her department had been working closely with New Jersey officials to coordinate assistance for people losing jobs in financial services, many of whom commute between states.þþ“What we’re saying is we’re having an economic emergency here,” Ms. Smith said. “We’re predicting 40,000 jobs lost in the financial sector and an additional 80,000 jobs as secondary effects. That’s 120,000 people that we need to help find jobs.”þþTo help the state shoulder the cost of the expected demand, Ms. Smith said, her department planned to apply for national emergency grants from the federal Department of Labor, as it did after the 9/11 terrorist attack. þþIn 2001, the state received an emergency grant of $20 million for retraining, a spokesman for the state labor department said; the state used $16 million and returned the remainder. Other states have received emergency grants after natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina.þþNew York will seek $10 million to help those who are laid off find new jobs or develop skills to change careers, Ms. Smith said. The state plans to ask for an additional grant of $50 million to preserve, through subsidies, jobs lost or threatened by the financial crisis.þþAs a hypothetical example, Ms. Smith said, a subsidy could pay part of the wages of workers in a restaurant in Manhattan’s financial district whose jobs would otherwise be eliminated because of a decline in business. þþShe said similar wage subsidies had been used to preserve jobs in the garment district and in other sectors after 9/11. The federal labor department, for example, gave a $1 million emergency grant to help workers in Chinatown after the attack. The wage subsidies would go mostly to lower-paid, less-skilled workers whose jobs would be indirectly jeopardized by the expected layoffs in financial services, Ms. Smith said. þþSeparately, she said, the department would use some of the retraining grant to create a placement office specifically for laid-off professionals in financial services. That center would be in the department’s offices on Varick Street in Manhattan, she said.þþThe New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development has a similar professional services group at its One-Stop Career Center in Dover in Morris County, said Jack Patten, director of the Morris-Sussex-Warren Workforce Investment Board. This year, that group has helped more than 25 professionals find new jobs with salaries of more than $100,000 a year, Mr. Patten said.þþThe first step in applying for federal aid will be for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to jointly seek a regional innovation grant of $250,000 to gauge the economic impact of the cutbacks in financial services and identify other industries that are growing and could absorb some of the cast-off workers, Ms. Smith said. That application should be filed this week, she said.þþ“New York will be the lead state on the grant,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for New Jersey’s labor department in Trenton. He said he thought that the applications for the much larger emergency grants would be filed on behalf of the region but he did not know what amounts would be sought. þþHe said New Jersey officials did not yet have an estimate of how many jobs might be lost as a result of the financial crisis.þþLikewise, Connecticut’s labor commissioner, Patricia H. Mayfield, said it was “too preliminary to assess the impact of the last several weeks on our workforce.” She added that, “recognizing that Connecticut workers could be very much affected by what is happening on Wall Street, our state will continue to talk with our neighbors regarding a joint grant request.”þþMs. Smith said collaboration would be necessary because many of the jobs lost will be scattered around the region, in the towns where Wall Street workers live. þþ“We want to be able to try to show that the impact is a regional impact,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s not just New York. Lots of people who are primarily affected live in New Jersey or Connecticut. Therefore, lots of people who will be secondarily affected work in the areas where these people live.”þþ
Source: NY Times
